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Communications

Tools of communication have transformed American society time and again over the past two centuries. The Museum has preserved many instruments of these changes, from printing presses to personal digital assistants.

The collections include hundreds of artifacts from the printing trade and related fields, including papermaking equipment, wood and metal type collections, bookbinding tools, and typesetting machines. Benjamin Franklin is said to have used one of the printing presses in the collection in 1726.

More than 7,000 objects chart the evolution of electronic communications, including the original telegraph of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell's early telephones. Radios, televisions, tape recorders, and the tools of the computer age are part of the collections, along with wireless phones and a satellite tracking system.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed a small fleet of three small ships west from Spain across the Atlantic Ocean, hoping to find a shorter route to the riches of Asia. Before his voyages, Chinese and Indian luxuries for European markets were transported over the long and hazardous overland route through Arabia.

The three-masted vessel Santa Maria was the largest of Columbus’s expeditionary vessels and his flagship. Measuring around 70 feet in length, it carried a crew of 40 men. The Santa Maria and Columbus’s other fleet members the Niña and the Pinta were older ships used for coastal trading rather than vessels designed for ocean crossings. Nine weeks after the little fleet left Spain, land was sighted in the Caribbean on 12 October 1492, but exactly which island Columbus’s crew first spotted remains disputed.

The fleet went on to explore the north coasts of the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola (now Haiti). On Christmas Day 1492, the Santa Maria ran aground on a reef off Hispaniola and was declared a total loss. The ship’s timbers were salvaged and used to build a small fort on shore. Fortunately for Columbus, he was able to return to Spain on the Niña.

Instead of Asia, Columbus had landed in the Caribbean islands on his first voyage. Although they were already inhabited, he claimed them for Spain. Columbus made three more voyages to the western hemisphere between 1493 and 1504.

Waves of conquerors and colonists—both free and enslaved—followed. What was a triumph for Spain became a catastrophe for native peoples. New livestock, plants, diseases, and beliefs unsettled centuries-old communities and ecosystems, changing and destroying the lives of millions.

This model was built at the Museo Maritimo de Barcelona, Spain, under the supervision of museum director Jose Maria Martinez-Hidalgo y Teran, who published a book on the Santa Maria in 1964.

This patent model demonstrates an invention for a shooting stick, used for driving in quoins, or wedges, to tighten a form in its chase; the invention was granted patent number 107154. These sticks had different-sized notches to fit different quoins, and two wings to help open spaces for the quoins among the furniture.

This patent model demonstrates an invention for a combination of quoins and sidesticks which was granted patent number 218518. The quoins swiveled on the ends of wide screws that turned into the sides of the metal sidesticks. A guage in the center of each sidestick told the compositor how far the quoin could be extended.

This patent model demonstrates an invention for a three-part quoin, the parts being held together by a key passing through a slot in the central wedge; the invention was granted patent number 148308. Roughened sides of the quoin prevented slippage on other furniture.

This patent model demonstrates an invention for sidesticks made with two symmetrical series of inclined surfaces; the invention was granted patent number 133948. Matching quoins were adjusted by turning a double-threaded screw.